[tex-live] texdoc can't find texmf.cnf

Victor Ivrii vivrii at gmail.com
Mon Jun 23 12:04:03 CEST 2008


On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 5:32 AM, David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> wrote:
> Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> writes:
>

> No.  The normal users want to see texts and not worry about the format
> it is in.  And if they have a viewer which is an order of magnitude
> faster and integrates with their editor (source specials), they will
> certainly prefer that.
>
>> Dvi and ps look like strange formats to them and it's yet another
>> barrier to enter the TeX world.  We should get rid of it.
>
> The "user" does not look at "strange formats".  He clicks on files and
> buttons.

There may be a little problem with very few packages: say animate.pdf
requires Adobe Reader to see animations correctly and no other
pdfviewer can handle javascript. Another little problem (probably
endemic to MacTeX) is/was that if documentation was in ps or dvi and
it was in the directory where user had no write privilege and viewer
was TeXShop, it behaved funny. In both cases user may be needs to
locate the document and open it in viewer different from the default
one. I think that the normal user should be able to do this but I know
that the average user is not able.

>
>> By the way, a similar choice has been made on CTAN, which favour pdf
>> documentation.  Since we try not to process documentation ourselves,
>> but rather use the version on CTAN, it's another point for pdf doc in
>> TL.
>
> CTAN is a different matter.  It is an archive, not a complete system.
> Standalone files make sense there.

MacTeX 2007 based on TeXLive 2007 had a lot of help links mispointed.
It looks like these links were consistent with CTAN rather than
TeXLive structure. I do not know if this problem was endemic to MacTeX
but it was really annoying. Again normal users tackled this problem
but average could not.

Victor



-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii


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